Entrance page (2 posts)

I am busy setting up a (replacement) site for my wife for her creche / pre-school. The idea to use wordpress came when she found a nice "template" online that came as a wordpress webset / template package.

I've long known about wordpress, have played with joomla a little (before it was called joomla if truth be told), have started learning PHP and python, and basically I think using wordpress is a good idea.

Now I've got this idea for something I'd like to try: To create an Entrance page which visitors are "forced" through once on each visit.

Essentially wordpress should check for the existence of a cookie.
1. If the user do not allow cookies, let him go to the requested URL.
2. If the cookie has been set, let him go to the requested URL.
3. If the cookie has not been set (or expired), then
3.1 Remember where he is going.
3.2 Present a cute "Welcome to our fairy world" page.
3.3 When the user clicks anywhere, go to the requested URL _AND_ set the cookie (so that the user only gets the entrance page once per day, maybe even once per 3 days)

The entrance page should also be invisible to search bots/crawlers.

I am sure this must be possible. If it is easy enough, I will do it, otherwise its not that important.

Now before I get a lot of responses about how this is bothersome/irritating/etc to the users, I have thought about that. The thing is that the image on this entrance page is so beautiful I think the added effect of feeling like entering a fairy world, the beauty, does outweigh and win out. I think in this case it will work, though I don't think it will be the right way to do it for 99% of web sites out there. And in any case if it doesn't work I expect it will be easy to remove.

I hate to say that I don't agree with you about the entrance page, but I do still see people using them. I'd keep a very close eye on ho wmany people see it, and then just leave. You'll probably be surprised.

If you really want to do this, you'll need to create a plugin that hooks into the page display to check the cookie, and redirect if it's not found. You will also want to store the page that the user is on, so that way when they click through your opening page they will go to the actual page that they wanted to see in the first place.

As far as difficulty goes, it's not to bad. It will take a bit of work, but it's probably not as hard as it sounds.